Alberto Campo Baeza

This project needed to deal with an existing project already under construction which presented various problems. After consulting with five different official groups (the Real Academia de Bellas Artes, the Consejo Superior de Arquitectos, Ministerio de Obras Públicas y Urbanismo, and the very same Foreign Office), a competition to resolve the problems was organized amongst the architects Sáenz de Oiza, Cano Lasso, Moneo, Navarro, Casas, and Campo Baeza.

The brief’s only binding condition was to respect the massing and the already poured footings of the earlier project: a base which completely occupies the triangular site and from which three seven story volumes emerge. Additionally the site is surrounded by high density residential blocks on all sides which match, and in some cases supersede, that of the planned structure.

The proposal consists of wrapping the whole with an accessible garden hung from a reticulated structure that matches the height of the building. A box, open to the sky, is thus formed to maintain privacy. The whole is supported, reinforcing the already existing base, on a stony podium of travertine. The hanging gardens are sheathed in translucent glass to the exterior, diffusing the light, protecting the offices from unwanted views, and shaping a clean volume to the street.

The interior massing is respected, improving the distribution and providing them with simple glass facades, translucent or transparent depending on their cardinal orientation.

Both radical and clear, this operation is executed with only the exact number of elements needed to work efficiently.